December 10th 2008
Our Crumbling Civilization: Chuck E. “FREEZE!” Edition
A
h, parents! Role models to the next generation – and where else to model those roles better than at Junior’s birthday party at the nearby Chuck E. Cheese pizza emporium, where, as the corporate slogan goes, a kid can be a kid.
And an adult can be a jerk.
In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child’s birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant’s music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain’s namesake mouse perform.
Chuck E. Cheese’s bills itself as a place “where a kid can be a kid.” But to law-enforcement officials across the country, it has a more particular distinction: the scene of a surprising amount of disorderly conduct and battery among grown-ups.
“The biggest problem is you have a bunch of adults acting like juveniles,” says Town of Brookfield Police Capt. Timothy Imler. “There’s a biker bar down the street, and we rarely get calls there.” (WSJ)
Law enforcement officials blame the presence of alcohol, the loud noise and the emotions that come with Junior’s birthday for the frequent fisticuffs and shouting matches. I blame a generation of spoiled, self-centered parents shot full of fake self-esteem and video game/TV violence, with no idea of how to behave themselves. Case in point:
This most recent assault, described in police reports, occurred after a woman in her 30s approached a 6-year-old boy who was playing a videogame. When the boy went to insert more tokens to continue playing, the woman grabbed the tokens out of his hand and told him to stop hogging the game. The boy went and got his 26-year-old mother, who walked over to the woman. The woman began screaming at the boy’s mother, and another suspect, a man in his 30s, grabbed the mother by the throat and pushed her against the videogame machine. CEC employees had to pull the man off the mother. Both the man and the woman fled the scene.
The prosecution rests.
Hat-tip: Jim
Posted in America, Civilization, Parenting | 2 Comments » | |
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December 12th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
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December 12th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Target Focus Training is useful for a lot of things, amongst them the fact that you won’t ever need the police to resolve such problems.